Mr Ocker was pretty smart, especially
observing pilots during and after happy hour. Trusting their senses was the
last thing on their minds.
Tony P
Life is Good
In God We Trust
[The Father of Blind Flying: William Charles
Ocker, {QB 2003}, knew there were times when a pilot couldn't trust his
senses.]
A typical flight instructor in 1917
would point to the instruments in a cockpit and tell his students to "pay
no attention to them." In aviation's early days, pilots flew by the
"seat of their pants." They trusted their eyes and gut feelings, even
though doing so sometimes killed them, especially when vertigo set in at night
or during bad weather. Such loss of equilibrium was considered part of the
business, a rite of passage that fliers just had to handle. A pilot who relied
on any instruments other than the compass, and perhaps the altimeter, was a
lightweight - or even worse, a coward.
William Charles Ocker,
"the father of blind flying," didn't buy into such macho posturing.
As an Army pilot in World War I, he had known too many competent fliers
who became disoriented and died needlessly; he himself had narrowly escaped
death in 1918 while testing one of Elmer Sperry's early turn indicators. Lost
in clouds with no visibility, Ocker discovered that the indicator showed his
plane in a turn while his senses told him he was straight and level. The
confusion sent him into a spiral dive: emerging from the clouds, he had just
enough time to regain control. Others might have blamed the instrument. Ocker
understood that, despite his training and experience, his pilot instincts had
failed him.
The bowlegged, bifocal-wearing
Ocker hardly fit the stereotype of a daring pilot or one who might challenge
conventional wisdom but he had a passion for flying and a fierce sense of
mission. Born in Philadelphia, he enlisted in the Army at 18 and fought in the
Spanish-American War and the Philippines as an artilleryman. In 1909 Corporal
Ocker met the Wright brothers while guarding their Wright Flyer during military
tests at Fort Myer, Virginia. Fascinated by airplanes, he transferred to the
Signal Corps' Aviation Section in 1912. Starting out as an aircraft mechanic,
he earned his wings in 1914 and an officer's commission three years later.
Throughout his career, Ocker
remained haunted by his close call and the reasons why it happened. A routine
physical exam in 1926 at Crissy Field in San Francisco finally provided him
with some answers. The flight surgeon, Capt. David Myers, sat Ocker in
a Jones-Barany chair, a swiveling, spinning seat designed to measure a
person's sense of balance and equilibrium, and challenged him to take the exam
with his eyes closed. Ocker discovered that when robbed of visual cues he
couldn't tell whether the chair was spinning or stationary, or even what
direction he turned. Myers had re-created the same disorientation that Ocker
had experienced eight years earlier.
Ocker devised a way to beat
Myers' test by rigging a turn indicator and penlight inside a covered shoe box
with a viewing hole cut in one end. Seated in the chair, he held the box up to
his face and watched only the instrument. Even though he was"flying
blind," he could now tell Myers precisely which way he moved and how fast.
Ocker had proved that conflict can exist between a pilot' subjective
perceptions and the readings of his instruments and that he should trust the
instruments, not his instincts, when that occurred.
With great zeal, Ocker spread
news of his discovery to other pilots. He perfected his "Ocker box"
by adding standard aircraft instrumentation such as a compass and artificial
horizon so that pilots could use the box in conjunction with the Jones-Barany
chair as a training device. Even the most experienced, instrument- skeptical aviators
could not help but be convinced after a spin in Ocker's rudimentary
flight simulator.
Despite the evidence, the Air
Corps stubbornly insisted that "blind" instrument flying was
unnecessary, dangerous, and would not become part of its pilot training
program. Many pilots learned it anyway under Ocker's tutelage. Some of his
superiors remained suspicious of this odd officer who liked to spin in chairs,
more than once forcing him to undergo psychological examinations.
Ocker persisted, taking his
ideas with him to his new assignment at the Air Corps' main training center at
Brooks Field in Texas. Along with the Ocker box, he invented the notion of the
covered cockpit in which a pilot has to rely strictly on instruments in flight
training. The Army Air Corps might have disapproved but PanAmerican Airways
soon adopted his methods in its flight school. He challenged the
instrument-flight skeptics further by making the first cross-country flight in
a completely covered cockpit, a nearly 900-mile jaunt from Brooks Field to
Scott Field, Illinois, on June 24, 1930. (The year previous, young Army officer
Jimmy Doolittle had become the first pilot to take off, fly, and land
completely on instruments, but that had only been a brief circle around an
airport.)
Ocker's research caught the
attention of Lt. Carl J. Crane, another pilot who'd had a close call when he
lost his bearings on a flight in 1925 and just missed the top of Detroit's
Statler Hotel with a Congressman's son in the back seat. Ocker and Crane
conducted numerous experiments on instrument flying and pilot’s disorientation,
most famously by tossing blindfolded pigeons out of an airplane in flight. They
found that these birds exhibited the same disorientation as did pilots when
confronted with severe cloud cover or darkness. (Most of the birds recovered
their bearings or managed to shed their blindfolds.)
In 1932, Ocker and Crane
distilled their research into the world's first instrument flight manual,
Blind Flight in Theory and Practice. While the U.S. military was slow to
acknowledge the book's value, the Soviet air force quickly adopted a pirated
edition as a standard text.
Ocker's restless energy led
him to pursue other aviation innovations. In 1938, along with Lt. George Smith,
he patented a propeller with hinged blades for quieter flight. In 1941 Ocker
and Crane created a "preflight reflex trainer," essentially a ground
flight simulator "pilot buggy" with a cockpit that could move in
three axes, powered with a one-cylinder engine and complete with a .22-caliber
blank-firing machine gun for target practice. Ocker also invented a
"flight integrator," a gyroscope-driven instrument that displayed a
plane's movements with a miniature plane on a screen depicting a sky complete
with clouds. More concerned with the welfare of his fellow flyers than with
profit, he assigned his patents to the government.
Controversy continued to stalk
Ocker. In 1934 he was court-martialed for supposedly making insubordinate
comments about a superior officer. When he proved that the officer had falsely
doctored Ocker's medical records to keep him grounded after an accident, he was
quickly acquitted.
Ocker also made some
influential friends along the way including Orville Wright who called him a
"missionary" with "more influence in bringing about the use of
instruments than any other person". He counted Eddie Rickenbacker, Billy
Mitchell, and Jimmy Doolittle among his supporters. Charles Lindbergh, Amelia
Earhart, and pioneering Australian aviator Charles Kingsford-Smith learned
about instrument flying from him personally. When he retired as a full colonel,
he was the oldest serving pilot in the U.S. military.
Ocker died at Walter Reed
Hospital in Washington, D.C., on September 15, 1942. The following year,
military authorities finally made his instrument training procedures standard
for all pilots. Few remember Ocker today; no airports, aviation companies, or
museums bear his name. Yet he would be happy enough to know that he rides with
every pilot who relies on instruments to find the way home.
By Mark Wolverton
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